Building a Parking App for the Disabled

Here at IrishApps we got a call from some enterprising students in Beara Secondary school in Castletownbere, West Cork. They wanted to build a parking app for the disabled which allows a user to find the nearest disabled parking spot and then to navigate to it via Google Maps. I visited the school during the summer and was warmly welcomed by Nina Murphy who is the head of the TY class there. The enthusiasm, drive and entrepreneurial spirit of the students and Nina was so impressive that we couldn’t say no to developing the app. True to their word, the students in Castletownbere have been working diligently over the past few months, gathering the coordinates for all the disabled parking spaces across Ireland. It wasn’t an easy or straight forward task. They had to contact all the county and city councils and get paper or PDF based drawings and then cross reference these with Google maps in order to extract useful latitude and longitude coordinates that we could use in the app.

While they were carrying out this painstaking work we were busy beavering away at writing the app itself using their drawings and example prototype APK which was written by Daragh Crowley, one of the students in the team and a future software engineer extraordinaire.

Whenever we had a spare few days here at IrishApps our own software engineer Manuel got stuck into it and as luck would have it, it gave us an ideal opportunity to test out a new secure database that we were preparing anyway!

The crew in Castletownbere are going to carry out a Beta test in the coming weeks and provide feedback on the UI, colour graphics etc and then it’s off to the app store to see if the disabled community across the country find it useful.

We’ll post an update when the Beara School team are ready to launch the app onto the market! As soon as they give us the green light we’ll publish it to the app store.